Conventional conference call telephones use one or more microphones to sample acoustic sound in the environment of interest and one or more loudspeakers to broadcast the incoming communication. There are several difficulties involved in such communications systems, including strong echo paths between the loudspeaker(s) and the microphone(s), difficulty in clearly transmitting the speech of users in the room, and little or no environmental acoustic noise suppression. These problems result in the outside caller(s) having difficulty hearing and/or understanding all of the users, poor or impossible duplex communication, and noise (such as mobile phone ringers and typing on keyboards on the same table as the conference phone) being clearly transmitted through the conference call to the outside caller(s)—sometimes at a higher level than the users' speech.